For Beran (pronounced ‘baron’), we rely on new vineyards along with old-vine plantings. We are honored to work with some of the most world renowned multi-generation Zin growers in Sonoma County, Napa Valley, Mendocino County, the desolate Sierra foothills of Amador County and other notable Zin regions. For instance, the Saini family has been growing Zinfandel in the Dry Creek Valley since 1917, and the Foppianos have been Sonoma County growers since 1896. On the new side is the dramatic Shannon Ridge Home Ranch in Lake County where a 15-year-old vineyard has been planted at elevations of 2,100 to 2,500 feet in lean, rocky and volcanic soil. Many of our growers’ vineyards are certified sustainable or certified organic.
Alan Foppiano
Foppiano Vineyard
Alan Foppiano will tell you that there are five different shades of green that grape leaves turn as the growing season progresses. Zinfandel sugars up really fast. When that’s happening, the leaves turn from an emerald green to a golden green. Just watch the leaves, he says. That’s how you’ll know what’s going on in your vineyard.
At his Rancho de las Aguilas—Ranch of the Eagles—vineyard that fronts the Russian River, Alan keeps close watch over the 30 acres he has under vine. Four acres are Merlot. Easy-peasy to grow, he says. Zin isn’t that easy. It falls more into the category of a labor of love. Managing the canopy is one of the keys to getting the perfect crop. Zin needs the right number of hours of sun each day for the fruit to develop rich, deep color so that requires leaf-pulling each year. Zin also rots really easily, so you need to keep your eye out for that. Sometimes the shoulders of the grape clusters need to be taken off. All in all, farming Zin is a tough business.
Knowing that, Alan still gave up a marketing career in the city to return to the family ranch. People like to use the word ‘nestled’ to describe a location even if that word doesn’t apply. They just like the sound of the word. But ‘nestled’ does apply to Alan’s ranch and vineyard tucked gently into the folds of low, forested hills, with Fitch Mountain rising in the background and the river flowing by at vineyard’s edge.
His family first planted grapes here in the 1980s, with some vines growing on the valley floor in fairly heavy alluvial soils, and the rest on benchland overlooking the floor. “Not every ranch can grow Zin,” Alan says. “But if you show up every day, it works. Like any relationship.”
To grow Zin, you almost have to be psychic. When you do it right, it's beautiful.
Alan Foppiano
Frank Rebottaro
Rebottaro Ranch Vineyards
Up on the Rebottaro Ranch in Mendocino County, it takes you a moment to realize why this place seems so different from just about anywhere else you’ve ever been. Then you identify it: it’s the quiet. This 550-acre ranch, with 60 acres planted to Zinfandel, Carignan and Cabernet, straddles a ridge in Mendocino County that’s 1,500 to 1,800 feet above sea level. No urban sprawl is visible here—just miles of rolling coastal hills, many of them heavily forested. San Francisco is a 100-mile drive south. Cloverdale, the closest town, has fewer than 9,000 residents.
It’s a place suited to its owner, Frank Rebottaro, who is quiet and spare with words. He has worked since childhood on this ranch where some 60-year-old vines are still producing. Frank himself planted some of the vineyard’s old-vine, dry-farmed, head-trained Zin more than forty years ago when he was a teenager. He says that what most people don’t realize about dry farming is that the first year the vines go in, they need water. It is indelibly etched in his memory the summer he spent dragging a garden hose around to water four acres of newly-started grapevines.
The soils here are really rocky, with a fair amount of clay that holds moisture. The soils, combined with the high elevation and dry-farming, cause the vines to struggle. That fight results in low yields, but the fruit is intensely flavored and bright.
Zinfandel is a hard one, Frank says. It doesn’t ripen consistently. Some grapes may be raisined while others aren’t even close to ready. He pulls leaves to help ripening, but then he has to be careful to prevent sunburn. Added to these concerns is the fact that harvest tends to be late up on his ranch, so wet weather coming in becomes a bigger risk for him.
Frank’s family are in this with him. His wife Linda also works on the ranch, and his 89-year-old mother spends her days at the ranch house on the property. Frank has three grown sons, one of whom works for him fulltime. The other two also have careers helpful to running a ranch. So who knows. The fourth generation might just take over some day.
Beran also sources Zinfandel from the Rebottaro Ranch in Alexander Valley.
I've worked on this ranch since childhood. I did make a living in construction for 20 years. But when my dad got sick, I came back to the ranch fulltime.
Frank Rebottaro
Peter Haywood
Los Chamizal Vineyard
You’re still in the lower reaches of Los Chamizal Vineyard when you’re hit with a surprising, 60-mile-long vista: the San Francisco skyline, clear as can be, along with vast stretches of San Pablo Bay. Gaps in the low coastal hills align to make this view possible, and the serendipitous topography also gives free passage to the morning fog that rolls in, along with breezy, but not windy conditions.
Peter Haywood bought this property in 1973 and started planting wine grapes the following year. At first he planted whites, but in the late 1980s when the phylloxera pest necessitated replanting, he tried Zin. It did particularly well in this vineyard that’s 90% hills with rocky soils and steep slopes.
When the Zins from his hill started to get attention, he planted more of it. Two favorable characteristics he noted at the top of the hill: the hard basalt base of the soil, plus south-facing slopes for later heat. The berries that these vines yielded were smaller but had greater intensity and different flavors. Other parts of the vineyard faced east and resulted in more elegant wines with greater aging potential.
He searched around for bud wood from growers he knew—not official Zin clones but undocumented field selections including a couple of Primitivos. Each that he chose offered a particular characteristic he liked. He also planted one certified clone, Zin Clone 6, at the top of the vineyard.
Much of Los Chamizal is so steep (up to 48 degrees in some parts), that it’s terraced to prevent erosion. Elevations range from 350 to 780 feet at the highest point, where the stunning panorama of San Francisco returns, along with a view of Sonoma at the foot of the hills with the town’s mission and the square famed for the California Bear Flag Revolt laid out as neatly as a map rendering.
It was from early federal photography of Sonoma’s square and the surrounding hills that Peter first spotted the words ‘Los Chamizal’ written. He was curious about the name, did some research and found out the words indicated a type of hardwood bush found on the hillsides here. He liked the name and kept it. Today, about 45 acres of the sustainably-farmed Los Chamizal are planted to Zin. The rest is a combination of Bordeaux reds, Rhone varieties and a little Chardonnay at the top of the ridge.
I have six different field selections of Zin planted, all dating back to before World War II. I chose each one for different characteristics of old-vine Zin.
Peter Haywood
Clay Shannon
Home Ranch on Shannon Ridge
If you want to uncover the ancestry of the Zinfandel grape—whose origins remain a mystery to this very day—you might just start at Shannon Ridge’s Home Ranch. Because here, on this sweeping ranch overlooking Clear Lake and Mount Knocoti, are the remains of a homestead where during the 1800s a family from eastern Europe—possibly Slovenia or Croatia—grew fruit and nut trees, raised livestock, in short, did whatever it took to scrape out a living. They also grew grapes. Today, a massive mother vine from those homesteading days remains near the still-standing barn and farmhouse.
How is all of this potentially a clue to the origin of the Zinfandel grape? Zin shares a DNA profile similar to a Croatian wine grape variety. How Zinfandel got here to California, or how it became known by the name of Zinfandel, has never been documented. All we know is that during the late 1800s, it became the most popular grape type all over the state, including Lake County.
Until Prohibition, Lake County was one of the state’s biggest producer of wine grapes. Then production dropped off but now new pioneers, like Shannon Ridge’s owner Clay Shannon, are putting the county back on the map. The High Valley AVA, where his home ranch is located, is particularly appealing because its very unusual east-west hill orientation pulls in cold air from the Pacific, making it cooler than other parts of the region. Planted at elevations ranging from 2,100 to 2,400 feet, the vines on Shannon Ridge have to battle shallow, volcanic soils that are low in nutrition but which bring about flavorful, concentrated fruit.
It’s windy up on this ridge, so much so that it’s eroded the hilltops. Shannon Ridge is a Certified California Sustainable Vineyard, and as part of his sustainability efforts Clay runs sheep through the property. Among other benefits, the sheep provide natural fertilization so that hilltop vegetation has grown back.
I love how nicely the Zin ripens up here and how big the bunches are. The fruit is purple, and dark, dark dark.
Christian Klier
Grower Relations/Viticulturist for Shannon Ridge
Grower Relations/Viticulturist for Shannon Ridge
Rudy and Dawn Mancini
The View Ranch
Calistoga is the northernmost town in the Napa Valley. Locals call its location ‘up valley’, a term you’ll often hear paired with ‘down-to-earth’. People do tend to be more relaxed, more grounded, here. Maybe it’s the effect of the famous geothermal hot spring pools of the region, great for melting away tension. Or maybe it’s the force of Mount St. Helena, the San Francisco Bay Area’s tallest peak, which sits guard over Calistoga. The importance of human endeavor shrinks when compared to its massive slopes and rocky palisades.
One of the two vineyards farmed by Dawn Mancini and her father Rudy is called the View Ranch, so-named because it offers a mesmerizing view of, and from, Mount St. Helena. The ranch has been owned by the Mancini family for four generations, starting with Dawn’s great grandfather John Barberis who emigrated from Italy to Calistoga at the turn of the 20th century. While many other emigrants chose to work on railroads or in warehouses, John and his brother stayed close to the land. They raised vegetables and sold them off the back of their farm truck.
Eventually John was able to purchase two parcels of land, including the View Ranch which was originally planted to walnuts and prunes. Then in the late 1950s, the first grapevines went in and the fruit was sold on a handshake to Brother Timothy of the Christian Brothers Winery. Today, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and old-growth Zin grow in this 16-acre, dry-farmed site on the valley floor. The fruit from their old-growth Zin reminds Rudy, who married John’s daughter, of blackberries. Yields are low, but the fruit is flavorful and intense.
Rudy is as vigorous and interesting as his old-growth vines. He first worked as a boxer, then when World War II began he enlisted. After the war, he spent 28 years working for the FBI. There’s a writer inside of him, too. He won a poetry writing contest for his work titled ‘Why Graperanchers Rise Earlier than Most’ in which the beauty, and trials, of fighting frost in a Zin vineyard are lyrically described.
Years ago, I asked Julio Gallo what type of grapes I should plant. He said Zinfandel. He said I wouldn't make a lot of money, but I'd always have a market for my fruit
Rudy Mancini